Getting the basics right, wherever you are in the world

I’m not saying for one second that we get the basics right at our company, but we’re on the right track.  However, I do see examples of where the basics in Internal Communications are being missed.  One of those companies is RundFunk, a German company who will remain anonymous.

To give you a bit of background, RundFunk operates in a difficult industry in Germany, where there is some stiff, cheaper competition, and they haven’t made a profit in a couple of decades.  In fact, the losses are in the hundreds of millions of Euro.  People who work for RundFunk are largely pessimistic about the company’s future and after some considerable bail-outs, there is some complacency about the reality of the situation.  The most recent bail-out from a large venture capitalist conglomerate has signalled make-or-break time for the senior execs at the company and they need people to be forward-thinking instead of backward-lamenting.

Next week, I’m starting a 6-week secondment with their Internal Communications team to help them start getting the basics right.  They aren’t doing a bad job of internal comms, but their messages – through no fault of their own – don’t relate to the strategy of the business at all.  This has resulted in communications which are completely separate from the business performance, goals, strategy and so on.  The existing internal comms are essentially ‘people communications’, e.g. “we had a party to celebrate moving into the new building and family came along – wasn’t it nice.”  The missing piece would have been along the lines of “and this new working environment means we’ve got better kit and better conditions in which we can be more collaborative, because of the open-plan arrangement, and more creative in newer, funkier surroundings.  We need to work on our product innovation and that means EVERYONE getting involved and being part of the company” and so on.

It’s not rocket science, but the incumbent IC team have lost their way a little.  After years of losses, a management structure which has evolved for the last three years and more change than they can handle (coupled with a lack of visible direction and support from the top), they have retreated back to the ‘easy’ messages of “aren’t we all having fun (even though the company is doing REALLY badly at the moment, but shhhh, don’t tell anyone.)”

The channels they are using are sophisticated enough: newish intranet, streaming, high quality video (high quality both in content and production) and consistent templates for emails.  The visual quality of their e-communications is actually better than ours, but there are very few face-to-face and two-way communication events, an area in which we have improved significantly over the past 18 months or so.

Throwing another interesting flavour into the mix, the CEO and many of the senior team don’t speak German, so face-to-face communications from these people are invariably in English.  That’s a sticking point, as I’m not going to be able to “do a Fabio Capello” with them and get them to speak the local language within a few months – we’ll have to work around that issue, topping and tailing CEO stand-up events with a German intro and outro, and chairing a Q&A session in both languages, using local people to translate as applicable.

I’m not going to go out there with an all-singing, all-dancing Communications Plan and Strategy, which gives them a ton of work to do in an unrealistic time-frame, as this will achieve nothing; arriving in a totally different company in a different company and culture and imposing my ideas on them – regardless of whether I speak German or not – will only get me resentment from those I’m trying to help.  After all, I’m going to need these guys to be my people on the inside, to give me the People View, instead of the Exco View – without knowing what people are really thinking, we’re never going to work out which communications are most suitable for them.

(As a quick aside, Wedge recently wrote a great piece about choosing between stakeholders and audiences when it comes to what to communicate – have a read.)

I want to help them develop their own Comms Plan after we’ve got a better idea of the strategy of the company (it’s there – it just hasn’t been articulated clearly yet), but in the first 2 weeks or so, I want to get them thinking about key messages to weave into their existing communications – key messages which reinforce what the company is trying to achieve.  In plain German.  Not in Anglicised/Americanised Business German – yes, it exists: sitting in meetings a few weeks ago, I noticed a peppering of business terms throughout the German conversations, which, on the plus side helps non-native speakers like me keep track of the meeting, but which also can alienate the Germans in equal measure.

It’s the same in any country and language – if you communicate in real language instead of business terms, people understand what you’re talking about and realise that you don’t need a Harvard MBA to know what business goals and strategy are.

The basics, in this case, will be making sure that there is a clear communication from the CEO and senior leaders of the organisation, in ‘normal’ language, to let people a) know what’s going on, b) understand what the company is aiming to achieve, and c) give them the opportunity to speak up and question things.  I’m also going in there looking for quick wins which make the current IC team feel comfortable and empowered to make these simple changes themselves.

I’ll report on how I get on at a later date, but would be interested to hear from anyone who has experience of working in another country and language, and to hear what your biggest challenges and successes were.

Repositioning Internal Communications

Recently, I’ve been considering the position of Internal Communications within our organisation and trying to figure out where it really should be.

Since the function began back in 2005, it has reported into HR as it was put in place by the HR Director soon after he joined.

In most companies, the function reports to an overall Communications Director along with corporate communications and public relations. In a few others, it sits in Marketing and in about 5% – I remember reading – it resides within HR.

In our company, there’s a distinct advantage to its home in the HR department; it avoids getting into sticky problems during difficult messages as the HR Director is all over it from a legal point of view. Internal Communications must be tailored carefully to make sure they’re not open to misinterpretation or conjecture.

I have a close working relationship with corporate communications to make sure what we’re saying internally won’t cause us issues if/when they leak externally (I have to assume that EVERY communication will go outside the company, as they invariably will.)

If we had an overall Communications function, I would sit within it gladly, but I would always need to have some sort of dotted reporting line into HR for the legislative reasons.

And this is where I believe Internal Comms needs to be at any company – and it should report to the executive committee and/or directly to the CEO. Of course I HAVE to say that Internal Communications should have a seat at the top table because it’s one of the most important functions within a business, but we’re seeing increasingly more evidence that ‘engaged’ employees contribute better to the overall success of a company and are more willing to go the extra mile to get the job done. People also appreciate being keep up to date with what’s happening around them, whether it is good or bad news; conversely, keeping people in the dark promotes cynicism and distrust.

I hope that one day our company will see the value in IC and put the right level of support behind it to make it a success across the entire business.

That’s my challenge and my goal.

Too many cooks

I’ve been away for a week and a bit on holiday in France, which was excellent.  I returned to work to find that the Internal Communications function had been managed exceedingly well while I was off, which is both comforting and worrying – am I still needed?!  Thankfully, I am…

There were a few hitches last week, which were covered well but one of them involved a communication to come out from the CEO.  As we all know in Communications, these things are rarely actually written by the CEO, so a few others (including me, having written an early draft) have been involved.

Our Internal Comms function reports into HR and there are pros and cons for IC reporting into HR.  The biggest pro for me is that I tend to avoid getting things technically incorrect when they apply to people; we always need to be careful when writing about things applying to ‘employees’ and not ‘contractors.’  ‘Staff’ is not a word I can use safely, as ‘staff’ is an ambiguous term to use for people working at the company.  ‘Colleagues’ is another word favoured by many IC professionals to make communications more friendly and inclusive, but again, the definition is not clear.

At the moment, this CEO communication is being looked at by people who are speech writers and external communicators.  And that’s where the danger comes in: although they have oodles of experience in writing top-level communications for big presentations to shareholders and investors, they overlook the basics which need to be applied to avoid ambiguity internally.  Using ‘colleagues’ to be make a communication sound less corporate (which, admittedly, it does) causes problems further down the line when contractors, freelancers, etc, claim to be eligible for a certain promotion or benefit.

Internal Communications need to be carefully written by someone with internal communicating experience.  I believe other professional writers can input valuable contributions, but ultimately it needs to be finished off by IC.

Anyone else have too many cooks spoiling the comms?